The Trouble with Surveys…

If you spend much time on the web, you may have noticed that more and more surveys are popping up.

This is something we think about a lot at StepChange, since surveys are one of the main ways companies gather insight to drive product iteration and improvement. As rapid product innovation is becoming more crucial online, we’re seeing more and more surveys from product teams starved for that insight.

From the perspective of a company offering a product online, surveys are a great idea. They let you ask all manner of questions to segment your audience, validate your assumptions, find areas for improvement, etc. For a marketer or a product manager, they’re one of the sharpest tools in your bag.

However, from the perspective of a customer – I think most surveys are fundamentally broken. Here’s why:

- Surveys are often alienating. Instead of making me feel “important and heard”, these pop-up surveys remind me that these companies don’t even know who I am. Case in point: We’ve spent thousands of dollars on HP computers here at StepChange, but last time I went to HP.com a long survey popped up that spoke to me like a total stranger. It made me feel less appreciated, not more.

- Surveys happen “outside the product”. Almost all of these surveys are trying to gather info about my experience with their online product (site, service, application, etc.). But in order to take the survey, I have leave the product and go into some form/pop-up/window, where the product context is lost. If you’re an iGoogle homepage user, you may notice a “New! iGoogle Survey” link, which opens up a new tab and takes you to a mutli-page form. Frustratingly, many of their questions are actually about which aspects of iGoogle I’ve used…which certainly they can tell from their logs. A little “in-product” context would go a long way here

- Surveys are too much “Work”. Most surveys are long, wordy and boring. It’s like a telemarketer call in the middle of your web experience. What’s more, they seem to take advantage of anyone willing to spend 10 seconds by dragging them into 3 pages and 30 required questions. As with telemarketer calls, customers are being trained not to click on web surveys…which is a problem for product teams needing that insight.

I think we can do better. I think we can “fix surveys” by replacing them with a contextual, “in-product user dialogue”. More on that to come…